The general purpose of this work is to develop chemical agents capable of specific inhibition of malignant cell growth. The approach used utilizes polymeric dye compounds which are designed to interact with DNA and exhibit base sequence specificity. Copolymeric dyes will be synthesized by vinyl polymerization of base-specific monomers bound to the target DNA sequence. Attempts to increase further the specificity will involve partition chromatography between target and host DNA. Of particular concern for the design of appropriate compounds are the structure of nucleic acid complexes and the origin of base specificity in DNA ligands. These problems will be studied with model systems such as drug-oligonucleotide complexes.